Text by the curator, Alper Turan;

 

In her installation A Picture of O,  Merey Şenocakreproduces a series of pictograms from the book O Anlar (can be translated as He/She/It/They Understand or Those Moments) (2018) that she made in intimate collaboration with the Turkish poet, philosopher, and translator Oruç Aruoba (1948-2020).

 

The artist-poet relationship began when Oruç gave Merey a signed copy of his book Benlik (can be translated as self, personality, or ego) which begins by addressing an "O" (gender-neutral pronoun for third-person singular in Turkish language), to the othered subject. Upon Merey’s invitation to reflect together upon the geometric and linguistic form of the curious “O”, they embarked on a five-month-long collaboration. Oruç gave her his own unfinished translation of Wittgenstein’s Geheime Tagebücher (Secret Notebooks) and asked her to study the manuscript using a detective’s glass. Merey dove into typewritten and handwritten pages, paying attention to the little notes written in the margins, scrutinized some parts, followed his adventure, and found different paths between lines. This process gave way to O Anlar: a book within a book, that also includes Merey’s reflections on O.

 

We can see this work in part on the mezzanine floor. Lined up in space as disassembled pages of a book, asking the viewer/reader to navigate in-between spaces of those pages, Merey’s work offers a diagrammatic story of an O. Borrowing schemas from Einstein, Heidegger, and Hölderlin and adding her own, Merey sketches the geometric propositions that separate and bring together the self and the other, center and periphery, interior and exterior. Within the abstraction of arrows, dots, lines, circles, and letters, dichotomies blur and dualities cease. Merey transfers the tracing papers of the original book onto the solid glass but preserves the transparency of the pages layered on top of each other. In the space, one can see-through all pictograms of O along a line, which reduces the resolutions of all images and makes all propositions into a single image of O.